BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

RETRODICTIVE ILLUSION (The) 3)

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It seems always possible to retrospectively "predict" some event that occured. This implies the a posteriori reconstruction of a deterministic chain of succesive events which led to the most recent one.

The concurrence of multiple causal events at the ultimate instant induces the illusion that the event had one cause only, that this cause in turn had one cause only, and so on in a retrodictive way. This is of course the result of a selection made by the observer and goes long to explain many heated debates and even lawsuits centered on "responsability for…" such or such situation.

However true causality is complex, as the result of growing interferences between numerous more or less simultaneous or successive local events.

The retrodictive illusion leads to the rigorously causal predictive illusion, which, during much time did conceal deterministic chaos.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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